The Butcher of Whack-a-White
Mondays at the slaughter is hard
graft, blunt rhythmic steel on bone.
Sheep hang their heads; muted now
as final sounds washed from stone
by bucket-slosh and scrubbing brush
send offal into the stream. Flax
line the banks, keeping the rito
clean and safe. The butcher,
tongue-trussed like poultry, ties words
together, saliva pools
on sounds unknown, skips and drowns
with the splutter, the stuttering
of right to own, right to buy
for an acre-penny. An arc
of savage-spit lands in the wash
from the bucket-tide.
Harakeke has tried, asking
Don’t you want meat from tuna,
kauru, pātiki, pāua?
You could fish for īnaka
in the shallowing water
No, says the butcher, I want meat
I can cleave, meat I can shape, meat
that rolls off my tongue—like brisket,
hogget, mutton, shank and shin
that I can tie with string.
On the hill behind the butcher
stands Matanaka; whose buildings
still glower at the sea like coals
smoking in the sea fret
Waikouaiti, mouths the stream
Waikouaiti, it whispers.
The butcher steels himself—he won’t
tolerate that sort of language
Jilly O’Brien is a poet and psychologist from Ōtepoti Dunedin. She has had poems published in Landfall, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, Mayhem, takahē, Catalyst, The Spinoff, and 1964, as well as overseas in Cordite Poetry Review, Rabbit, Stand, The Blue Nib, and Not Very Quiet. In 2023 Jilly won the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Competition and in 2024 she was shortlisted for the Wigtown International Poetry Prize.
‘The Butcher of Whack-a-White’ is the winner of the 2025 Monica Taylor Poetry Prize. Judge Janet Newman writes:
Finding a Favourite Fox
with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
it enters the dark hole of the head.
—Ted Hughes, from ‘The Thought Fox’
Judging is really picking a favourite, and what an honour it has been to have 362 poems to choose from. The large number of entries in the Monica Taylor Poetry Prize 2025 reveals the abundance of creativity and poetic inspiration in these often difficult and shifting times. While I sense a loss of stability in the world, poetry, with its ability to hone down into emotions and perceptive moments, provides solid ground for our thoughts, fears, hopes and desires. Along that ground, as Ted Hughes evokes, the prints are set ‘now / And again now, and now, and now.’ Words on a page.
Congratulations and bravo to all poets who entered. It takes time, emotional energy and courage to complete a poem and send it out of the midnight forest into the clearing.
From a longlist of sixteen and a shortlist of eleven, I have selected a winner, second place and highly commended. If your poem is not in these lists, view it not as a sign of failure but rather as proof of the sharp brilliance of the competition.
The winning poem, ‘The Butcher of Whack-a-White,’ by Jilly O’Brien, is a class act of precise language, from the intriguing title to the final stanza in which the title’s significance is divulged. Ostensibly about the ways in which a butcher’s trade pollutes a stream, the poem is a metaphor for the idiom ‘butchering the language’ and a depiction of the negative downstream effects of colonisation on culture and ecologies. In the final stanza, ‘Whack-a-White’ is revealed as the poorly represented colonial pronunciation of Waikouaiti. The butcher’s relentless pursuit of meat to ‘cleave’ and ‘shape’ transitions to a reshaping of language with metaphors from the craft exposing a mangling of the Māori name alongside the colonial occupation of land. Matanaka, the settler farm whose buildings remain at Waikouaiti Bay, is portrayed as alien to the natural landscape. The poem’s relentless rendering of vehemence, rough actions and blunt language portrays the butcher as ‘savage,’ in opposition to the gentleness of the whispering stream and the ecologically sound suggestions of endearing harakeke. In the final couplet, the word ‘steels’ earns the significant weight it carries. It suggests the butcher’s intransigence against the correct pronunciation of Waikouaiti and the notion of ecological kaitiakitanga—and also the violence of the knife. The poem has a tidy and innovative structure: eight four-line stanzas with single emphatic lines after stanzas four and six. Off-rhymes throughout create movement and rhythm, interrupted at the ends of lines 22 and 23 by the dull thud of the word ‘meat.’
Second place, ‘THE OTHER SIDE,’ by Jessica Le Bas, adeptly recalls the poet speaker’s thoughts alongside a conversation by presenting the poet speaker’s voice in the second person and Kevin’s voice in direct speech. The voices are believable, and the poem’s emotional centre—an alarming yet dominant ignorance about the value of the natural world—is convincing. Kevin’s responses are strident and confident as he fails to listen to descriptions of species seen at the estuary. He mocks and interrupts the narrator who doesn’t try to change or convince him or the others who laugh in agreement, and who allows him the last word. Yet the persistent naming of birds, fish and insects and their carefully observed habits reveals the presence and proximity of a vibrant natural world which is unnoticed by many people. The dual meanings of the poem’s title and final line portray an alarming loss of human connection with nature in a technological age.
Highly commended, ‘Dawn Chorus,’ by Rebecca Hawkes, is a beautiful lyrical verse. Its narrative about a sex worker and a shepherd who share homesickness for their rural pasts is conveyed through compelling metaphors comparing the protagonists with indigenous ecologies and birds. The representation of longing through bird song and dog whistle creates a musical quality. Unpunctuated phrases separated by white space flow down the page. Abrupt line endings create poignant pauses. The song-like poem ends on the other side of the world with an expression of love and, fittingly, a lyric from American indie folk band the Mountain Goats.
First place: ‘The Butcher of Whack-a-White,’ Jilly O’Brien
Second place: ‘THE OTHER SIDE,’ Jessica Le Bas
Highly commended: ‘Dawn Chorus,’ Rebecca Hawkes
Shortlist (in alphabetical order of title)
‘580nm,’ Laurice Gilbert
‘Acorn,’ Andrea Ewing
‘Dawn Chorus,’ Rebecca Hawkes
‘Ghazal for the Earth,’ Marjory Woodfield
‘MUNDANE DETAILS,’ Jasmine Taylor
‘Paraselene,’ Mikaela Nyman
‘Supermarket run; matuku moana, the traffic and me,’ Alex Stone
‘The Butcher of Whack-a-White,’ Jilly O’Brien
‘THE OTHER SIDE,’ Jessica Le Bas
‘[Title of this Poem] [Waitangi],’ Hana Buchanan
‘Two Harbours, One Heart (in the style of Nazim Hikmet),’ Ines Almeida
Longlist (in alphabetical order)
‘580nm,’ Laurice Gilbert
‘Acorn,’ Andrea Ewing
‘Aku waewae e rua,’ Hana Buchanan
‘A Rahui over Aotearoa/New Zealand,’ Rangi Faith
‘Dawn Chorus,’ Rebecca Hawkes
‘Ghazal for the Earth,’ Marjory Woodfield
‘He Koha, He Koha, He Koha,’ Rangi Faith
‘MUNDANE DETAILS,’ Jasmine Taylor
‘Paraselene,’ Mikaela Nyman
‘Saturday night,’ Kathryn Martin
‘Supermarket run; matuku moana, the traffic and me,’ Alex Stone
‘The Butcher of Whack-a-White,’ Jilly O’Brien
‘THE OTHER SIDE,’ Jessica Le Bas
‘Three deer,’ Jillian Sullivan
‘[Title of this Poem] [Waitangi],’ Hana Buchanan
‘Two Harbours, One Heart (in the style of Nazim Hikmet),’ Ines Almeida
Janet Newman lives at Koputaroa in Horowhenua. She has a PhD from Massey University for her thesis ‘Imagining Ecologies: traditions of ecopoetry in Aotearoa New Zealand’ (2019). Her essays about the sonnets of Michele Leggott and the Romantic ecopoetry of Dinah Hawken won the Journal of New Zealand Literature Prize for New Zealand Literary Studies in 2014 and 2016. She won the 2015 New Zealand Poetry Society International Competition, the 2017 Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems and was a runner-up in the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Awards. Her first collection of poems, Unseasoned Campaigner (Otago University Press, 2021), won the 2022 New Zealand Society of Authors Heritage Book Award for Poetry, and she co-edited Koe: An Aotearoa Ecopoetry Anthology (Otago University Press, 2024).